St. Bernard of Clairvaux 2023
From 1970 until the mid-eighties, the BBC ran a series entitled “Play for Today”, a collection of hard-hitting dramas, sometimes controversial, dealing with contemporary issues. It is impossible to imagine such a series being screened much earlier, and today many of the matters with which the plays dealt no longer seem so relevant. As dramas, they are still gripping and enjoyable, but they are no longer of immediate concern.
For instance, I recently watched a trilogy from the series, a trilogy known as the Billy Plays, set in Belfast in the early 80s, and originally broadcast at the time. “The Troubles” formed the background to the drama, which was played out in a Northern Ireland which, in many ways, has changed in the last forty years. These were indeed plays for their day.
I wonder whether St. Bernard, in his time, might usefully have been described as “Saint for Today”. There are saints whose appeal transcends time: they would have been at home in any era. Thomas More has been described as a man for all seasons; Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, with their sensible sanctity and chaste friendship and cooperation, would have greatly benefited the Church had they been around today. Clare of Assisi’s apostolic vision would have been allowed to flourish in the Church of the early 21st century in ways impossible in the 13th.
On the other hand, there are saints who clearly belonged to their time. The maudlin piety of St. Aloysius no longer appeals, whilst Bl. Dominic Savio, lauded in the CTS pamphlets of my youth as “the schoolboy saint” would embarrass the youth of today. There are others, who shall remain nameless, who seem unfitted to any age.
Is it fair to say that Bernard belonged very firmly to the twelfth century? He was a reformer, and the Church always needs reformers—it is ecclesia semper reformanda, the Church always needing to be reformed—but the issues and remedies of today may not be those of Bernard’s day.
A young man of what was described in those days as “noble birth”, Bernard entered the abbey of Citeaux in 1113, at the age of 22 or 23. Such was the impression he made that, only a couple of years later, aged 25, he was sent to establish, and to be Abbot of, a new foundation at Clairvaux, with which his name is forever associated.
At the heart of his spirituality lay a powerful commitment to renunciation, and, at least in his early days, he had a tendency to carry this to excess, both in his own life and in that which he imposed on the brethren. His fasts were so severe that he made himself ill, to the extent that he had to take a year out from the monastery. Subsequently he relaxed the austerity to an extent, but it is alleged that a hole was dug next to his abbatial chair to enable him to vomit.
Bernard lived a century before the establishment of the friars who owed their origins to Francis of Assisi and to Dominic: hence, he was not familiar with Thomas Aquinas’ axiom that grace builds on nature. In his case, grace had a very clearly defined nature on which to build. One of his biographers described him as “impassioned all his life”: he could never be thought of as a shrinking violet.
He threw himself wholeheartedly into controversies, never allowing charity to curb the enthusiasms of tongue or pen. He quarrelled vehemently with the abbots of Cluny, addressing one of them, Peter the Venerable, “with a pen dipped in gall” as a contemporary observer expressed it. He called Louis XVI, King of France, “the new Herod”, described the Roman curia as “a den of thieves”, a judgement with which Pope Francis might well have concurred, and had no hesitation in criticising bishops, and even the Pope.
For 26 years, from 1127 until his death in 1153, Bernard was involved every year in temporal affairs, travelling the length and breadth of Europe. This may seem a very strange trait in a cloistered monk: Bernard’s comment was “God’s business is mine. Nothing that concerns Him is foreign to me.” In the course of his journeys, he helped resolve a papal schism, which saw two rival claimants to the See of Peter; joined a mission against the Albigensians, whom Dominic too would confront a century later; stopped a pogrom against the Jews but, less commendably, preached a crusade.
In all of this, Bernard remained a faithful son of the Church. He would criticise popes, but he was loyal to the papacy. Unlike later alleged reformers—Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and others—his concern was to preserve the unity of the Body of Christ, not to tear it apart. He, rather than they, deserves the title of “Reformer”.
Known as the Mellifluous Doctor—the doctor flowing with honey—Bernard has left us 332 of his sermons, including the sublime “In praise of the Virgin Mother” as well as the outstanding Marian prayer, the Memorare. By the time of his death, Clairvaux housed the staggering number of seven hundred monks, and 160 foundations had been made from Citeaux, including the great English abbeys destroyed in the English Reformation. So many miracles were attributed to Bernard post mortem that his successor as abbot went to his tomb to ask Bernard to stop performing them, as the monastery was being overrun by pilgrims.
It does seem that Bernard was a man of his time. Had he been alive a few centuries later, his acerbic criticisms of popes and bishops might have prevented the tragic divisions in western Christianity which are yet to heal, though perhaps the papal court of those days would have been less willing to listen than was that of the twelfth century. He will never feature in a new series of “Play for Today”, but we can at least enjoy his spiritual legacy, and be grateful for his reforming spirit.
